Marriage

“The whole of Christianity really centres on this transformation of human love which is brought about by the love of Christ. In Christian marriage man and woman can really love one another with an infinite love, because each gives himself to Christ in the other. This is the total sacrifice of love for which our nature craves. Like everything else in Christianity it is a sacramental love; it is a revelation of the Spirit in the flesh. In this relation sex becomes what it was always intended to be, a symbol or sacramental sign of love. The union of spirits is brought about by the union of flesh.”

Bede Griffiths

Sexuality

“[D. H. Lawrence] taught me what I believe is the only true solution to the problem [of sexuality], namely that sex is essentially a ‘holy’ instinct. It is not merely good in itself… but it is something ‘sacred.’ The evil of immorality in sex is not merely that of self-indulgence, but the profanation of something sacred, the desecration of a holy instinct which arises from the depths of our unconscious being and is the bearer of life or death. I think that Lawrence first made me begin to see that the evil of our civilization lay in this, that it had desecrated the sources of life. Primitive man might often be immoral and cruel and superstitious, but he retained a sense of ‘holy’; he was still in contact with the inner sources of life, and therefore there were beauty and dignity in his life. We, with all our science and reason and morality had lost this sense of the ‘holy’ and therefore all our works were ugly and our minds were sterile.”

Bede Griffiths